In recent years, various alternative types of product packages or containers, such as juice boxes or pouches in which a plastic, foil, or paperboard tube or sleeve is filled with a liquid beverage or other bulk material and then sealed, have become popular, lightweight alternatives to conventional disposable beverage packaging, such as bottles and cans. Typically, such packages or containers are arranged in parallel rows of two, three, four, five, etc. packages, to form four-packs, six-packs, ten-packs, etc., and are then shrink wrapped or placed in paperboard cartons for sale. Unlike bottles or cans, such juice boxes or pouches often are flexible and have irregular shapes or configurations that can be difficult to control, thus creating special problems with the handling and packaging of these containers.
For example, most juice pouches generally tend to be soft-sided foil tubes that have a tapered configuration, extending from an expanded, rounded bottom upwardly toward a flattened upper or top portion, and further can be formed with an hourglass or other irregular shapes or configurations such that they are not readily stackable one on top of another. Such pouches or similar containers further often will have fins along their upper and side edges where the foil or paperboard material has been sealed, which fins also can be engaged or otherwise interfere with the movement of the pouches along the packaging line. In addition, many of these type containers also typically have straws attached along their front or rear panels. These straws are generally attached with a bead of adhesive, approximately along the center of the straw, and given the irregular shapes of such containers, typically do not lie flush against the panel of the container. As a result, there is a significant danger during the handling of such containers that the straws can become caught, dislodged, or pulled away from the packages. In such an event, the packages will have to be pulled out of the packaging line. The loose straws further can interfere with the downstream movement and packaging of the remaining pouches.
Still further, it generally is desired to package juice pouches, or similar flexible containers together in a tight formation so that they can be packaged in as small a carton as possible to avoid waste. Therefore, after stacking, the pouches generally have to be compressed or urged together into a tighter formation for packaging, which can compound the problems of handling such packages. Consequently, the problems with material handling of such pouches due to their irregular sizes and shapes, as well as the application of straws thereto, typically significantly limit packaging rates for the pouches in order to try to minimize the potential problems with packaging such containers in cartons. This correspondingly limits the production of the containers themselves and/or requires additional packaging lines to handle the supply of containers, which is not always practical or cost effective.
Accordingly, it can be seen that a need exists for a method and system for reliably and efficiently packaging pouches and other irregularly shaped products in cartons that enable the packaging of such containers at increased rates and which addresses these and other related problems in the art.